Radar Imaging Simulation for Urban Structures

With the recent advent of very high resolution (VHR) spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors such as TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed, the potential to use SAR simulators is increasing. In this letter, we propose a novel radar imaging simulator that is relatively simple to implement and that finds a balance between accuracy and efficiency. The main goal of the proposed method is to obtain a precise simulation of the geometry of objects in SAR images rather than a detailed radiometric simulation. The simulator is based on an extended ray-tracing procedure to determine which surfaces of a generic object contribute to the backscatter. The backscatter contributions are calculated by means of a Lambertian-specular mixture model. The simulator has already been employed successfully in a methodology for 3-D reconstruction of man-made objects from single detected VHR SAR imagery. Here, we illustrate its work on two rather different structures, a rectangular gable-roof building and an Egyptian pyramid.